probuild onboarding
Everyday Massive partnered with Probuild to design an onboarding experience that would be truly reflective of their vision: a commitment to building greatness, and their employee value proposition: an experience beyond expectation. The result was an onboarding experience that is structured and strategic, with a focus on people, not paperwork.
background:
If you live in a major Australian city, you’ve probably passed through the shadows cast by one of Probuild’s structures. With 1,000 employees and 10,000 subcontractors, Probuild is a tier-one construction company delivering high-end commercial and residential structures.
From job site to head office, Probuild is built by great people with a shared commitment to ‘Building Greatness’.
Construction is a fast-paced, ever-evolving, high-risk environment. With 1000’s of people on sites each day, ensuring everyone is on the same page with how things are done the Probuild way, is imperative to a remarkable employee experience. For Probuild, this transfer of knowledge and building of capability across safety, people services, culture and communication needed to begin with an industry first, world-class onboarding program.
As the first key experience with any organisation, onboarding ensures new employees have the right cultural knowledge, mindset and skills required to settle in to their new roles as quickly as possible to begin performing and working together effectively.
The shift:
To arrive at a solution, we needed to get really clear about the problems we were solving.
The Probuild team had invested time in gathering data and feedback from new hires and internal stakeholders, they understood the pain points and where their people were looking for more from the experience. This meant a rapid gear change for the next phase — designing the future state of onboarding at Probuild.
Inconsistent to consistent
Onboarding at Probuild was decentralised and inconsistent between locations. Some parts of the business had developed their own way of onboarding, some were doing it well, others not at all. We needed to develop and design Probuild’s way to onboard and roll it out across the business.
High administration burden to digitised and highly automated.
There was a high administrative burden with the People and Culture team manually sending forms and contracts, organising police and medical checks, entering data and ordering equipment. Most of this administration burden could be digitised an automated, giving the hiring team back much needed time to focus on other areas of the people experience.
Process to people
Onboarding began when a candidate was offered the position, and ended after the day 01 induction. Beyond the logistical, the experience lacked any cultural onboarding — missing a huge opportunity to cognitively frame new employees with life at Probuild, and then to continue that cultural onboarding well beyond day 01, considering the employee experience across the first 12 months of employment. With the admin streamlined, there was more space to develop the cultural onboarding component of the program.
Incongruent to congruent
Probuild had recently redeveloped their EVP* — An experience beyond expectation, in an effort to strengthen and be more competitive with their employer brand. As the first test of a promise made, the onboarding program had to be congruent with the promise of an experience beyond expectation.
*with Everyday Massive’s help
Fragmented to end-to-end
For the new starter, the existing onboarding experience was disjointed, lacking an end-to-end, consistent user experience. Multiple departments across People & Culture, Safety, Finance and external vendors all needed to be involved at some point.
A clear journey map and centralised workflow was needed to steer the experience.
Onboarding is a psychological process — as much emotional as it is rational. And the best way to design for this sort of experience is taking a human-centred design approach. We worked with the Probuild People & Culture and Safety teams, to journey map the ideal end-to-end experience across the various user journeys — the new starter, people & culture, safety, external, communication and tech requirements.
The art & science:
Our process blends art and science, drawing on the psychology of behaviour, motivation and learning, applied with human-centred design and communication principles. Driving emotions help shift behaviour, while a narrative layer increases connection. Curiosity draws attention to crucial messaging and inspires active learning. Complex systems and processes are simplified and visualised to reduce cognitive load and increase comprehension.
Policies and documents were rewritten the employer brand tone of voice and redesigned to be highly visual. Video was used heavily to ensure consistency of crucial messaging — all in all, 18 videos were produced to bring the onboarding program to life. Safety — as a key component of the compliance training — was delivered in a highly engaging format of bite sized critical risk videos and followed up with highly interactive online training.
organisations that invest in experience - based onboarding programs:
Prostart is the perfect combination of technology and human — the best of both worlds coming together to create the ultimate onboarding employee experience. Commencing from the moment of job offer right through to celebrating one year of service.
approach
Journey mapping —
By journey mapping the new starter experience we were able to identify the moments that mattered and design an experience that matched emotionally as well as technically. These ‘moments that matter’ don’t have to be major events, it’s often the little things that have a big impact on new starters. Office equipment sorted, knowing where to park the car on day one and a buddy to recommend where to grab a good cup of coffee!
Leveraging technology —
One of the big decisions the team needed to make was around the choice of supporting technology.
Our requirements were:
Digitisation of forms
Automation
Highly customised user experience (ie. we could design our own flows and put our own content in)
Light touch(no need to go back to the company to make changes. An easy, fully editable user interface for complete control)
Fully integrated into existing HR tech
Mobile friendly (mobile being the preferred method of receiving content)
Value for money (ie. very reasonably priced!)
Personas —
The Probuild workforce is multi-generational, located across multiple locations, a mix of office and site-based and predominantly male. Developing personas was vital to the process to ensure design took into account common user needs and brought them to the forefront of planning before design has actually started. Personas provided the team with a shared understanding of users to meet their needs and objectives.
journey mapping:
“Enboarder and the Prostart workflow has been excellent to work with; a highly agile system that we have been able to tweak along the way. For example, we’ve made a whole new workflow just for our cohort of Graduates
commencing in 2020, with
custom process & messages.”
the prostart experience over 393 days:
the prostart experience map
Sample works
In addition to a much improved experience for new starters, the business benefit has been substantial. With close to 100 administrative tasks automated through the clever use of technology, the People and Culture team are spending their extra hours partnering with the business on high impact activities.
New starters are more engaged and productive than ever before having been immersed in an experience that considers their needs at every touchpoint.
Probuild as a business has moved its onboarding experience from:
impact:
P&C hours saved per year through automation
288
Reduction in turnaround time retrieving new hire paperwork
72%
Administrative tasks automated per new hire
98
“Well done everyone involved in getting all of this together - it really is impressive and is a great platform on moving forward'“
Sianne P&C Business Partner Probuild
Has the assistance you’ve been receiving
to get onboard been helpful:
(1-5)
4.6
Smiles created:
*data accuracy TBC
2811*
